Published 17 August 2026 · Last updated 17 August 2026
“Hockey” means two different sports depending on where you are reading this. In Canada, the United States, Sweden, Finland, and Czechia it means ice hockey. In England, India, the Netherlands, and Australia it means field hockey. The two sports run on different surfaces, different seasons, and very different cost bases, but the club office problem is almost identical: a membership secretary is holding the whole club together with a spreadsheet, a bank statement, and a group chat.
This page covers hockey membership software for both codes. Where the operational detail differs, and it does differ, the difference is called out rather than smoothed over.
Ice hockey or field hockey: same admin, different money
The membership record a club needs looks the same in both codes. What changes is the size and rhythm of the money moving through it, which is the thing that actually decides whether a spreadsheet still works.
| Ice hockey club | Field hockey club | |
|---|---|---|
| Largest recurring cost | Ice time. Rink hire is booked and paid for in blocks well before anyone has confirmed they are playing. | Pitch fees. Water-based and sand-based astro hire, usually per session, plus a share of floodlighting. |
| How members pay | Season registration up front, often with a monthly instalment option, plus dry-land or extra ice sessions billed separately. | Annual subs plus match fees collected per fixture, which is the part clubs most often lose money on. |
| Squad structure | Age classifications set by the national body, plus adult recreational and beer-league teams. | Men’s, ladies’, and mixed sides numbered by league position, plus a junior section by age group. |
| Governing body link | Every player is individually registered with the national association for the season before they can play. | The club affiliates, and players are registered through the club for league and county competition. |
| Season shape | Long winter season built around rink availability. | Autumn to spring league season, with summer leagues and indoor hockey filling the gap. |
The scale on both sides is larger than most people outside the sport assume. USA Hockey’s published membership statistics record 586,002 registered players for the 2025-26 season, alongside 68,792 coaches and 32,710 officials, for a total of 687,504 registered members. On the field side, England Hockey states a membership of more than 800 clubs across 45 counties and 8 areas, with around 140,000 people playing regularly in the club system. Almost every one of those clubs is administered by volunteers. The admin problem is shared with every other club sport, and our general sports club membership management software page covers the parts that are common to all of them.
What a hockey club actually has to track
Hockey membership software has one job that matters above all the others: knowing, at any moment, who is a paid-up member of which team, and who is not. Everything else is downstream of that.
The four things a hockey club member record has to do
- Hold the person. One record per player, coach, official, parent, or social member, not one row per team they appear in.
- Hold their money. Subs paid, match fees outstanding, and what they owe for the current season, visible next to their name.
- Hold their place. Which team or age group they belong to this season, and which ones they belonged to before.
- Let you act. Email the under-14s, chase the eleven people who have not paid, or check in an event attendee, without exporting anything.
The fourth item is where club spreadsheets fail. Filtering a sheet down to the players who owe match fees is easy. Emailing exactly those players, recording that you emailed them, and then seeing which of them paid is the part that needs the record and the actions to share one home. That gap is the whole reason membership management software exists as a category.
The fields a hockey club needs
| Field group | What it holds | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | Name, date of birth, email, phone, emergency contact | Date of birth is not optional in a club with juniors. It drives age group placement and it drives who you are allowed to contact directly. |
| Membership | Member type (playing, non-playing, social, life), join date, renewal date, current status | Renewal date has to be a real date field. Every reminder and every lapsed-member report depends on it. |
| Teams and age groups | Squad or team for the current season, age group, position, playing status | A player moves up an age group every year. If this is stored as a tab per team, you rewrite the whole structure every August. |
| Money | Subs paid, match fees outstanding, kit orders, tour payments, balance carried from last season | If payments live only in the bank statement, nobody can see paid status next to team selection. |
| Registration | National association or league registration number, registration expiry, insurance status | An unregistered player on the ice or the pitch is a forfeited fixture and, in some competitions, a fine. |
| Consent and safeguarding | Photography consent, medical notes, communication preferences, parent or guardian contact, date and source of consent | You have to be able to show when and how a member, or a member’s parent, agreed to something. |
The first two groups are common to every club sport. The last four are where hockey specifically diverges, and they are the reason a generic contact list runs out of room quickly. In Raklet these live in custom fields, which you define yourself rather than working around someone else’s fixed schema. The number of custom fields included scales with the plan and can be extended with an add-on pack instead of forcing a full tier upgrade, and current allowances are listed on the pricing page.
Subs, match fees, and tour money in one place
Ask any hockey treasurer what takes the most time and the answer is not accounting. It is chasing. Subs, match fees, tour deposits, and kit money arrive as forty separate bank transfers with reference fields like “hockey” and “Dave”, and reconciling them against a member list is a genuinely unpleasant evening.
Three things fix most of it. Payment has to happen at the point of joining or renewing, not as a separate step the member has to remember. Renewal reminders have to fire automatically, because a volunteer committee in the middle of a season will not send them by hand. And refunds have to be issuable without leaving the system, because the alternative is somebody refunding a cancelled tour place in the payment provider and then forgetting to update the membership record.
Raklet handles all three. Memberships carry renewal dates that drive automated reminder emails from the Professional plan upwards, payments run through Stripe with limited PayPal support, and refunds are processed natively inside the platform rather than in a separate payment dashboard, which most platforms in this category cannot do. Raklet does charge a platform transaction fee on top of the payment processor’s own fee, and it varies by plan, so check the pricing page for current rates rather than trusting a figure quoted in an article.
The segments worth saving in a hockey club are always the same handful, and each one is a question you currently answer manually:
- Members whose subs are due in the next 30 days
- Players registered for the season who have not paid anything yet
- Members who lapsed at the end of last season and have not come back
- Juniors who turn an age this year and move up a group
- People who came to the summer taster session and never joined
None of this is unique to hockey. Any club whose costs are driven by booked facility time faces the same reconciliation problem, which is why the pattern on our tennis club membership management software page will look familiar to a hockey treasurer paying for ice or astro by the hour.
Teams and age groups inside one member database
Most clubs model teams as separate spreadsheet tabs, which is why a player who moves from the under-16s to the second team disappears from one list and reappears in another with no history connecting them. A single member database with team and age group as fields on the person fixes that. The player keeps one record, one payment history, and one timeline, and the team they play for this season is an attribute rather than a filing location.
In Raklet this is done with custom fields and saved segments, which is enough to answer the questions a membership secretary is actually asked: who is in this squad, who in it has paid, who is registered, and who has aged out. It is worth being clear about the boundary. Raklet is a membership and community platform, not a fixture and scheduling system. It does not manage fixture lists, ice-time or pitch bookings, team sheets, or league tables, and if those are the problems you most need solved, you will want a dedicated scheduling tool alongside it. What Raklet replaces is the member database, the subs collection, the communication, and the events, which in most clubs is the larger and messier half of the job. For the broader operational picture across club types, our club management software overview is the wider view.
Communication that reaches players, parents, and volunteers
Hockey clubs communicate in layers. The whole club gets the AGM notice. One squad gets the training change. Parents of juniors get the safeguarding update and the tournament consent form. Committee members get the things nobody else should see. Running that from a personal email account and three group chats means somebody is always missed, and the person missed is usually the one who joined last month.
Raklet includes email campaigns built into the platform, so segments defined in the member database are the same segments you send to, with open, click, and bounce rates visible without exporting anything. Alongside that, the member portal is a private social network with configurable boards, which clubs use for squad discussions, coaching notes, or club-wide announcements that deserve to outlive a chat thread. Members reach it through the free Raklet mobile app on iOS and Android, which is available on every plan, or through a browser. Clubs that want the app to carry their own name and crest in the app stores can add a custom-branded app as a paid add-on.
Events, tournaments, and check-in
A hockey club’s calendar is not only fixtures. It is the presentation night, the summer tournament, the junior camp, the quiz night that pays for new goalkeeping kit, and the AGM that needs a quorum. Each of those has a guest list, most have a price, and some have to be members only.
Raklet’s event app handles unlimited ticket types per event, so a tournament can price entry differently for members, guests, and juniors from one event page. Tickets can be restricted to members, which is the thing that makes an AGM or a members-only social workable. Attendees receive a confirmation email carrying a QR code, and on the day, staff or volunteers scan those codes to check people in. Event check-in is available from the Professional plan upwards. Attendance is written back to the member’s record, so over a season you can see who turns up to everything and who has quietly stopped coming, which is the earliest warning you get before a renewal is lost.
Junior sections mean you are holding data about children
Any hockey club with a junior programme is holding personal data about under-18s: dates of birth, medical notes, photography permissions, and parent contact details. That is a higher-sensitivity category than an adult member list, and it comes with obligations that do not disappear because the club is run by volunteers. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office publishes guidance aimed specifically at small organisations, including charities, groups, and clubs, which is the right starting point if nobody at your club has looked at this before.
Two practical habits do most of the work. Store consent as data rather than as a memory: not just that a parent agreed to photography, but when they agreed and through which form. And let members and parents maintain their own details through a self-service profile, because the parent is the only person who reliably knows the new phone number, the new address, or the newly diagnosed allergy.
Data protection duties depend on where your club and your members are, and the rules that apply to a club in Ontario are not the rules that apply to a club in Hampshire. Treat this section as orientation rather than advice, and speak to a qualified professional about your club’s own obligations.
What Raklet gives a hockey club
One record per person, not per team
Custom fields carry team, age group, position, and registration number, and saved segments turn them into lists you can email or invoice directly.
Subs, match fees, and native refunds
Renewal dates drive automated reminders, payments run through Stripe with limited PayPal, and refunds are issued inside the platform rather than in a separate dashboard.
A timeline that survives the committee
Memberships, payments, and event attendance sit on one profile as a running history, so a new membership secretary inherits the record instead of starting again.
Your data stays yours
Export the full database whenever you want. API access is available on the Premium plan for clubs building their own integrations.
Two limitations worth stating plainly, because most vendor pages in this category do not. Raklet does not do fixture scheduling, ice-time or pitch booking, or league tables. And Raklet’s page builder is code-based, taking custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, rather than a drag-and-drop template editor, so a club with no website at all and no technically confident volunteer should weigh that before committing. If you already have a club website and the thing that is broken is the membership admin behind it, neither is a constraint you will notice.
Frequently asked questions
Does hockey membership software work for both ice hockey and field hockey?
Yes. The membership record is the same in both codes: people, teams and age groups, subs, and registration status. What differs is the cost structure, since ice clubs are managing rink hire booked in advance and field clubs are managing pitch fees and per-fixture match fees. A general membership platform handles both because it is modelling the member, not the surface.
Can I collect annual subs and per-match fees in the same system?
Yes. Annual subs are a membership with a renewal date, and match fees, tour payments, or kit orders are handled as separate paid items attached to the same member record, so the treasurer sees one balance per person rather than reconciling a bank statement against a spreadsheet.
How do I handle juniors moving up an age group each season?
Store age group as a field on the person rather than as a separate list per team. Then moving a player up is one field change on one record, and their payment history, attendance, and previous age groups stay attached. Storing teams as separate lists means rebuilding the structure every season and losing the history each time.
Does Raklet manage fixtures, ice time, or team sheets?
No. Raklet is a membership and community platform covering the member database, subs and payments, communication, events, and check-in. Fixture lists, rink or pitch bookings, team selection, and league tables are not part of it, and clubs that need those typically run a dedicated scheduling tool alongside a membership platform.
What does a hockey club membership database need to store?
At minimum: name, date of birth, contact details, emergency contact, member type, join and renewal dates, current team or age group, subs and match fee status, national or league registration number and its expiry, and consent records covering photography and communication. Parent or guardian contact details are required for any junior member.
Is this suitable for a small club run entirely by volunteers?
That is the usual case in both codes. The features that matter most to a volunteer committee are the ones that remove recurring manual work, particularly automated renewal reminders and payment at the point of joining. Raklet’s free plan covers 100 contacts, which is enough for a small club to import its list and test the structure before paying for anything. If you are setting a club up from scratch, our guide on how to start your own sports club covers the steps that come before the software question.
Put your hockey club admin in one place
If your club currently answers “who has paid?” by opening a spreadsheet, a bank statement, and a group chat, the fix is not a tidier spreadsheet. Raklet puts the member record, the subs, the communication, and the events in one place, and the free plan is enough to import your list and see whether it holds up before your season starts.